Thursday, June 08, 2006

Zarqawi Dead

What fantastic news to receive right before I go to bed. I thought the much ballyhooed capture of Sadaam Hussein in the big picture wasn't that big of a deal. He was a tyrant that deserved to be tried for war crimes, but he wasn't in the position to do that much damage. Zarqawi is a completely different story. As far as the potential to kill many innocent people and destabilize an entire region, he's as bad as they come. It provides great hope that the Iraqi government might be able to build a coalition and move forward.

2 Comments:

nivek navillus said...

Don't get too excited. Al Zarqawi is not necessarily the be-all/end-all in Bush's deceitful war on Iraq:

The Pentagon is engaged in a psychological PR propaganda campaign to exaggerate the role of Musab Al-Zarqawi in Iraq and link the war in Iraq to 9/11. How do we know? Because their own leaked documents admit it.

An April 10th Washington Post article brazenly stated,

"The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks."

The Post even described how the Pentagon had concocted fake Al-Zarqawi letters boasting about suicide attacks and leaked them to Dexter Filkins of the New York Times, who splashed it on the front page the next day. Despite the fact that Filkins had severe doubts about the authenticity of the letter, the Times got down on their knees, licked boots, and published it anyway.

And the military leadership has the nerve to claims its propaganda doesn't target US citizens and only appears in 'liberated' Iraqi newspapers.

The same documents directly state that the false promotion of Al-Zarqawi includes marking the the "U.S. Home Audience" as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign."

Transcripts of meetings between the Joint Chiefs of Staff talk about turning Al-Zarqawi into a caricature and making him appear, "more important than he really is."

I can certainly see the administration doing that for political purposes, but just because they exaggerate doesn't mean he isn't a key figure in there, for symbolic and real reasons. I seem to be more optimistic than a lot of commentators, and I wasn't at all fooled that Saddam was going to mean much in the big picture.